Saturday, December 31, 2016

Hamas militants take part in a rally marking the 12th anniversary of the death of the late Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Gaza City, March 2016. (Reuters)

It was the key national-security debate of the 2016 election. Donald Trump won the election, in no small part, because he appeared to be on the right side of it. Appeared is used advisedly: Trump was at least in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye; his opponent wouldn’t even acknowledge the target existed — except in the most grudging of ways, and only because Trump had forced the issue.

The question boiled down to this: Are you willing to name the enemy?

After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at least a start. We should note, moreover, that it’s a start we owe to the president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump’s outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses. Comparative anonymities (looking down at my shoes, now) could try terrorism cases and fill shelves with books and pamphlets and columns on the ideology behind the jihad from now until the end of time. But no matter how many terrorist attacks Americans endured, the public examination of the enemy was not going to happen unless a credible candidate for the world’s most important job dramatically shifted the parameters of acceptable discourse.

Trump forced the issue into the light of day. And once he did — voilà! — what was yesterday’s “Islamophobia” became today’s conventional wisdom. In reality, it was never either of these things. The former is an enemy-crafted smear (a wildly successful one) to scare off examination of the enemy; the latter is frequently wrong.

What we Cassandras have really been trying to highlight is a simple fact, as patent as it was unremarkable from the time of Sun Tsu until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: To defeat the enemy, you must know the enemy — who he is, what motivates him, what he is trying to achieve. Being willing to name the enemy is a start. But it is just a start — the beginning, not the end, of understanding.

In his major campaign speech on the subject, Trump asserted that the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism.” Terrorism, surely, is the business end of the spear, but “radical Islamic terrorism” is an incomplete portrait. Dangerously incomplete? That depends on whether the term (a) is Trump’s shorthand for a threat he realizes is significantly broader than terrorism, or (b) reflects his actual — and thus insufficient — grasp of the challenge.

The speech provided reasons for hope. For one thing, Trump compared “radical Islamic terrorism” to the 20th-century challenges of fascism, Nazism, and Communism. These were ideological enemies. The capacity to project force was by no means the totality of the threat each represented — which is why it is so foolish to be dismissive of today’s enemy just because jihadist networks cannot compare militarily to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, toward the end of his speech, Trump used “radical Islamic terrorism” interchangeably with “radical Islam.” Ending the spread of radical Islam, he said, must be our objective. He even referred to it as an “ideology” — though he called it an “ideology of death,” which misses the point; it is an ideology of conquest.

Trump intimated some understanding of this, too. He vowed to “speak out against the oppression of women, gays, and people of different faith [i.e., non-Muslims].” He promised, in addition, to work with “all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East.” The objects of radical Islamic oppression are targeted because of ideological tenets that call for dominion by sharia, Islam’s ancient totalitarian law. It is those tenets that reformers are trying to reform.

In sum, Trump showed signs of awareness that there are more than bombs, hijacked planes, weaponized trucks, and jihadist gunmen to confront. Still, his focus was terrorists — specifically ISIS, which he claimed was created by Obama-Clinton policy. While he clearly knows there is more to the threat than ISIS, he explicitly added only al-Qaeda and “Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah.”

To the contrary, ISIS is a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda that existed before Barack Obama came to power. Hamas, though certainly supported by Shiite Iran, is a Sunni terrorist organization spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood. More crucially: All of the groups Trump listed, and the regimes that sponsor them, were created by the ideology. While I’ll go with “radical Islam,” the ideology is more accurately described as “sharia supremacism” — alas, in the parts of the world Trump was talking about, “radical Islam” is not so radical. It is the ideology that creates jihadist groups and regimes, not American policy, no matter how clueless and counterproductive our policy has been at times.

If ISIS and al-Qaeda disappeared tomorrow, other jihadist networks would take their places. It will be that way until sharia supremacism is discredited and marginalized.

That is a tall order, not to be underestimated. The audience in which the ideology must be discredited is not Western; it does not share our value system — our sense of what is credible and meritorious. Plus, the sharia that our enemies strive to implement (i.e., “jihad in Allah’s way”) is undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. It will not be easy — it may not be possible — to discredit a literalist construction of Islam that has been backed by revered scholars for 14 centuries.

That is why some detractors of Islam argue with considerable force that we should stop mincing words: If the problem is rooted in Islamic doctrine, they contend, then the problem is Islam, not “radical Islam.” Yet this overlooks significant facts. There is fierce intramural Islamic debate about doctrinal interpretation. Our own Judeo-Christian experience tells us that doctrine and religious practice can evolve. Belief systems, moreover, are ultimately about more than doctrine. Culture counts for a great deal. Yes, sharia supremacism is pretty much the same wherever you go (and becomes more aggressive and threatening as its adherents increase in number); but the understanding and practice of Islam varies from Riyadh to Cairo to Kabul to Ankara to Jakarta to Tirana to London.

There is, furthermore, an on-the-ground reality of much greater moment than theological infighting: A large percentage of the world’s approximately 1.6 billion Muslims reject sharia supremacism. Many of them provide us with essential help in fighting the enemy. To condemn Islam, rather than those who seek to impose Islam’s ruling system on us, can only alienate our allies. They are allies we need in an ideological conflict.

The sensible strategy, therefore, calls for supporting the Islamic reformers President-elect Trump says he wants to befriend. That would be an epic improvement over outreach to Islamists, whom our government has inanely courted and empowered for a quarter-century. To the extent we can (and that may be limited), we should support the reinterpretation of what Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi courageously acknowledged as “the corpus of texts and ideas that we [Muslims] have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible” even though they are “antagonizing the entire world.”

Sisi, it is worth noting, is a devout Muslim who knows a lot more about Islam than Barack Obama and John Kerry do. In any event, it’s better to confront with open eyes the scripturally rooted ideological foundation of radical Islam. As we’ve seen over the last three presidential administrations (or the last six, if you want to go back to Carter and Khomeini’s revolution), pretending that the ideology does not exist, or that it represents a “false Islam,” is fantasy. As a national-security strategy, fantasy is a prescription for failure.

It has been the Obama prescription, right up to the end.

While candidate Trump was demanding that the enemy be named, and me-too Hillary was thus goaded into the occasional mention of “jihadists,” Obama tried to defend his refusal to invoke radical Islam. The defense was classic Obama. Part One was flat wrong: “There’s no religious rationale,” he maintained, that would justify” the “barbarism” in which terrorists engage — something that could only be right if we ignore scripture and adopt Obama’s eccentric notion of “religious rationale.” Part Two drew on Obama’s bottomless supply of straw men: “Using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” he lectured, will not make the terrorist threat “go away” — as if anyone had claimed it would.

The point, of course, is not that there is talismanic power in uttering an enemy’s identity. It is to convey, to the enemy and to an anxious American public, that our leader comprehends who the enemy is, what the enemy’s objectives are, and what drives the enemy to achieve them.

Obviously, Obama is too smart not to know this. After eight infuriating years, I am beyond trying to fathom whether his intentional gibberish masks some misguided but well-meaning strategy, some dogma to which he is hopelessly beholden, or something more sinister. The imperative now is to address the mess he is leaving behind, not unwind how and why he came to make it.

This week, Obama betrayed our Israeli allies by orchestrating (and cravenly abstaining from) a U.N. Security Council resolution. As I’ve explained, the ostensible purpose of the resolution is to condemn the construction of Israeli settlements in the disputed territories of East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria that Israel has controlled since 1967; the real purpose is to declare that those territories are sovereign Palestinian land, and thus that Israel is “occupying” it in violation of international law (“international law” is the gussied-up term for the hyper-political, intensely anti-Israeli Security Council’s say-so).

What does this have to do with our enemy’s ideology? Everything.

The Palestinians and the Islamist regimes that support them frame their struggle against Israel in terms of Islamic obligation. Hamas, the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood branch that has been lavishly supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and other Muslim governments, is more explicit about this than its rival for Palestinian leadership, Fatah. But both are clear on the matter. They take the doctrinal position that any territory that comes under Islamic control for any duration of time is Islam’s forever. (That’s why Islamists still refer to Spain as al-Andalus and vow to retake it, notwithstanding that they lost it half a millennium ago.)

Further, radical Islam regards the presence of a sovereign Jewish state in Islamic territory as an intolerable affront. Again, the reason is doctrinal. Do not take my word for it; have a look at the 1988 Hamas Charter (“The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement”). Article 7, in particular, includes this statement by the prophet Muhammad:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, “O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” . . . (Related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

Understand: Al-Bukhari and Muslim are authoritative collections of hadith. These memorializations of the prophet’s sayings and deeds have scriptural status in Islam. Hamas is not lying — this story of an end-of-times annihilation of Jews is related, repeatedly, in Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., here.) And please spare me the twaddle about how there are competing interpretations that discount or “contextualize” these hadith. It doesn’t matter which, if any, interpretation represents the “true Islam” (if there is one). What matters for purposes of our security is that millions of Muslims, including our enemies, believe these hadith mean what they say — unalterable, for all time.

Even after all the mass-murder attacks we have endured over the last few decades, and for all their claptrap about respecting Islam as “one of the world’s great religions,” transnational progressives cannot bring themselves to accept that something as passé as religious doctrine could dictate 21st-century conflicts. So, they tell themselves, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simply about territorial boundaries and refugee rights. It could be settled if Israel, which they reckon would never have been established but for a regrettable bout of post-Holocaust remorse, would just make a few concessions regarding land it was never ceded in the first place (conveniently overlooking that East Jerusalem and the West Bank are disputed territories, and were not “Palestinian” when Israel took them in the 1967 war of Arab aggression).

Transnational progressives see Israel as intransigent, notwithstanding its many attempts to trade land for peace. They rationalize Palestinian terrorism as the product of that intransigence, not of ideology. Thus their smug calculation that branding Israel as an “occupier” of “Palestinian land” in gross “violation of international law” is the nudge Israel needs to settle. This will effectively grant the Palestinians their coveted sovereign state. Thus accommodated, Palestinians will surely moderate and co-exist with Israel — if not in peace, then in the same uneasy state in which Parisians coexist with their banlieues and Berliners with their refugees.

It is not just fantasy but willfully blind idiocy. No one who took a few minutes to understand the ideology of radical Islam would contemplate for a moment a resolution such as the one Obama just choreographed.

Under Islamic law, the Palestinians regard all of the territory — not just East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria but all of Israel — as Muslim territory. Furthermore, they deem the presence of a Jewish-ruled state on that territory as anathema. A Security Council resolution that declares Israeli control of the disputed territory not merely an “obstacle to peace” but illegitimate tells the Islamists that their jihad has succeeded, that non-Muslim powers accede to their sharia-based demands. It can only encourage them to continue their jihad toward their ultimate regional goal of eradicating the Jewish state. After all, Mahmoud Abbas has stated his racist terms: Not a single Israeli will be permitted to reside in the Palestinian state. As Islamists see it (and why shouldn’t they?), Obama’s reaction was not to condemn Abbas; it was to appease Abbas. As Islamists see it, Allah is rewarding their fidelity to Islamic doctrine; of course they will persevere in it.

We are not merely in a shooting war with jihadists. We are in an ideological war with sharia supremacists. Mass murder is not their sole tactic; they attack at the negotiating table, in the councils of government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom — at every political and cultural pressure point. To defeat jihadists, it is necessary to discredit the ideology that catalyzes them. You don’t discredit an ideology by ignoring its existence, denying its power, and accommodating it at every turn.

President Obama never got this. Will President Trump?

In his campaign, Trump made a welcome start by naming the enemy. Now it is time to know the enemy — such that it is clear to the enemy that we understand his objectives and his motivation, and that we will deny him because our own principles require it.

The new president should begin by renouncing Obama’s Palestinian power-play: Revoke any state recognition Obama gives the Palestinians; defund them; clarify the disputed (not occupied) status of the territories; move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; reaffirm the principle that the conflict may only be settled by direct negotiations between the parties; and make clear that the United States will consider the Palestinians pariahs until they acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, stop indoctrinating their children in doctrinal Jew-hatred, and convincingly abandon terrorism.

That would tell radical Islam that America rejects its objectives as well as its tactics, that we will fight its ideology as well as its terrorism. This is not just about restoring our reputation as a dependable ally. Our security depends on it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Our ineffable secretary of state, John Kerry, delivered another parting shot at Israel today, offering the Obama administration’s “vision” for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. There are many things to be said about it — not least that Kerry’s speech, like last week’s venomous, Obama-orchestrated United Nations resolution on which it builds, is something “pro-Israel” Democrats make sure to do after Election Day.

Kerry did not mention that Jordan was never subjected to international pressure to grant the Palestinians their own state during the 19 years that Jordan occupied Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem; nor did he acknowledge that the Palestinians would long ago have had their own state if they had recognized Israel’s right to exist and abandoned jihadist terror. Leaving all that aside, Kerry accused the Israeli government of undermining any hope of a two-state solution. In this context of claiming that Israeli policy was “leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation,” Kerry admonished: “If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both.”

Presumably, Kerry was referring to the fact that Israel has a significant Arab-Muslim population. He conveniently did not mention, since it must never be mentioned, the vow of Mahmoud Abbas (the Palestinian leader Kerry sees as Israel’s “peace partner”) that, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — soldier or civilian — on our lands.”

Implicitly, of course, if Kerry is saying that a country with a Muslim minority cannot maintain its Jewish character and still abide by democratic principles, then neither can the United States maintain its Judeo-Christian character and still abide by democratic principles — notwithstanding that our Judeo-Christian character is the basis for our belief in the equal dignity of all men and women, a foundational democratic principle. It is a principle one does not find in classical Islam, the law of which explicitly elevates Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women.

I thought it might be interesting, then, to review the Constitution of Afghanistan, which the State Department had a major role in drafting. Here are Articles One through Three:

Article Two: The sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Followers of other faiths shall be free within the bounds of law in the exercise and performance of their religious rituals.

Article Three: No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan.

Then there’s Article Six:

The state shall be obligated to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, preservation of human dignity, protection of human rights, realization of democracy, attainment of national unity as well as equality between all peoples and tribes and balance development of all areas of the country. [Emphasis added.]

A “progressive society based on social justice” that is both Islamic and democratic? According to the State Department, no problem.

Then there is the Constitution of Iraq, the drafting of which the State Department similarly oversaw. Its preamble and first article assert that the nation is “looking with confidence to the future through a republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic system,” and that the Republic of Iraq’s “system of government is republican, representative, Parliamentary, and democratic.”

There follows Article 2:

First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation:

A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.
B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.
C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.

Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice such as Christians, Yazedis, and Mandi Sabeans.

Note that second clause carefully. It assures that Iraq will maintain its Islamic identity no matter what. It further reaffirms that, when it comes to an Islamic country, the State Department believes a country can be fiercely Muslim in character, yet be a democratic republic that respects the rights of religious minorities.

Of course, as things have worked out, we’ve seen that even Muslim minorities are not granted equal rights in these “Islamic democracies.” Concurrently, we watch Turkey, which gets less democratic and less respectful of minority rights as it becomes more Islamic. It is only in Israel, a Jewish state, that Muslims live with full democratic rights.

Yet, in Obama-world, Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic. Evidently, you need sharia for that.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Middle East peace at the State Department in Washington December 28, 2016. (REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan)

In the Obama administration's waning days, global challenges to American interests abound. In Syria, which will be a bloody stain on the reputations of Barack Obama and John Kerry, the killing continues. The effort to free Mosul from ISIS is slowing. The rise of Iranian influence in the Gulf and the Levant, of China in Asia and the western Pacific, and of Putin's Russia in both Europe and the Middle East, all continue. One might have thought any of these could be the subject of a final address by the president or the secretary of state.

But one would have been wrong. John Kerry delivered what is probably the last major speech of the Obama administration Wednesday, and its subject was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and especially the growth of Israeli settlements. So the Obama administration ends where it began: obsessed with Israelis and Palestinians as if their struggle were the key to peace in the entire region, and with construction of homes in settlements and in Jerusalem as if it were the major roadblock to a peace agreement.

In a speech that was remarkable for its length, its defensive and even whiny tone, its attack on the government of Israel, and for its lack of new ideas, Kerry tried to explain both last week's failure to veto a UN Security Council resolution and eight years of failed Obama policy. His central argument was that the two-state solution is essential, is possible, and is being destroyed by Israeli settlements. The administration did not veto the resolution, he said, because it was balanced: It rebuked Israel for settlement expansion but also rebuked the Palestinians for incitement.

The latter point is significant, and shows the fundamental failure of Kerry's argument. The resolution passed last week will do actual damage to Israel, because calling all the settlements and even construction in East Jerusalem a violation of international law opens Israel to further boycotts and to prosecution as criminals (in local courts all over the world or the International Criminal Court) of Israeli officials or of settlers. The "balance" that moved the administration to permit adoption of the resolution was non-existent: There is in the resolution no call upon the Palestinians to stop glorifying terrorism by naming schools and parks after murderers and celebrating their "achievements." Instead the resolution does not mention the Palestinians in that context at all and merely "calls for compliance with obligations under international law for the strengthening of ongoing efforts to combat terrorism…and to clearly condemn all acts of terrorism." Israel is condemned but the Palestinians are never criticized in that supposedly "balanced" text.

Kerry noted in his speech that "We have repeatedly and emphatically stressed to the Palestinians that all incitement to violence must stop." Kerry actually spoke at some length about these Palestinian practices, as if repeating how much he dislikes them strengthened his point. But it does not, because the United States has been complaining about this for all eight years of the Obama administration to no effect whatsoever. The key point is that the Palestinians are never penalized for glorifying terror and the U.N. resolution doesn't penalize them either. The resolution will harm Israel and do nothing at all to the Palestinians, which means it is not balanced and Kerry's argument here is simply false.

Kerry did acknowledge that the settlements per se are not "the whole or even primary cause" of the failure to achieve a peace deal, and that land swaps would actually absorb most of the settler population into Israel. And he was certainly right to note that the more settlers who live beyond the Israeli security barrier, the harder it will be to get political support in any Israeli coalition government for a peace agreement under which they must move out. He was right to suggest that the strength of the settler movement makes it hard for any prime minister to negotiate and to challenge the logic of an increasing settler population in outlying areas that under any conceivable agreement would not form part of Israel. And Kerry also had some practical suggestions about how life can be made better for Palestinians, for example by expanding their economic activities in Area C, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank.

Had he focused on such practical steps for the last four years, had he made his case about settlement activity without the apocalyptic tone, and had he ever penalized the Palestinians for actually killing Israelis and then glorifying those acts, his arguments might be more persuasive and receive a larger audience than they will today. At this moment, they seem like the last defense of a policy that has achieved nothing except damaging bilateral relations.

Kerry presented himself as a devoted friend of Israel, but what came through far more powerfully was his complete failure to understand how progress could be made. He and Obama tried from the start to reach an impossible comprehensive deal (just as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had done) rather than focus on the incremental progress that really might have been achieved. To call for such incremental progress, three weeks before he leaves office, is folly; he wasted four years and Obama wasted eight viewing such steps as "small ball" unworthy of great men such as they. Kerry's speech called for "realistic steps on the ground" now to establish the path forward. If only he had said that in 2013 when he took office, or Obama had said it in 2009, progress might actually have been possible.

But why is a comprehensive agreement not possible? Here Kerry was hopeless. He said he had failed because the two parties lack trust, not because they are far apart. It is an old argument: they are an inch apart, the issues are not so hard, we will push and pull them over the line. American leaders have been trying that since 1967, and it was not so much audacity as vanity that led Kerry to believe he would succeed where all his predecessors had failed. But they are far apart, very far apart, and Kerry's "parameters" for peace actually demonstrated that—and also demonstrated that this administration has failed to achieve anything in its search for peace except to undercut the Israeli position.

Kerry laid out six points or parameters for reaching a comprehensive peace agreement: there must be secure borders and a viable, contiguous Palestinian state; there must be two states in which full and equal rights are guaranteed for all citizens; the refugee issue must be solved; Jerusalem must be the capital of both states and must not be divided; the occupation must end and Israel must be secure, while Palestine must be non-militarized; and there must be a final end to the conflict, with all further claims extinguished.

It must first be said that his formula closely resembles the Clinton Parameters of 2000; there is nothing terribly new in his proposals. Indeed, Clinton—exactly 16 years ago this week—was more detailed in his ideas. Why it was essential, or thought useful, to restate the Clinton Parameters somewhat more vaguely, with three weeks to go before this administration leaves office, is mysterious. But in several ways the Kerry proposal actually turns back the clock—and never in a way that helps the Jewish state. The refugee issue is the best example. George W. Bush said in 2004 that "It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel." As the last five words made clear, there will be no "right of return" for Palestinians. Why could John Kerry not say this rather than being vague about it?

The administration also turned back the clock by agreeing that all settlements violate international law, which will surely make it harder for the Israelis to argue that they have a right to keep some in any negotiated final deal. The previous U.S. position, in the Bush years, had been that expanding the settlements is unhelpful—a much less prejudicial formulation to the Israeli position. Here it might be added that the second of Kerry's parameters, about equal rights for all citizens, was in essence a calumny against Israel. Israel is a democracy that guarantees the rights of Israeli Arabs, who have 13 representatives in the 120-member Knesset. Its court system protects them; its press is free; its Christian population is growing. The Palestinian Authority has held no national elections since 2006, and there is growing repression of freedom of speech and press. Kerry did not see any reason to mention this while casting aspersions on Israel. The subject of Israeli Arab citizens has no place whatsoever in discussions of a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO, and Kerry's allusion to it was unfair and wrong.

Kerry also treated Israel unfairly in precisely the manner Obama did in his 2009 Cairo speech by equating completely unequal things in a way that defies common morality. In Obama's speech, he notoriously spoke of the Holocaust and then said, "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians—have suffered…."—as if the Israeli occupation of the West Bank were the moral equivalent of Nazi genocide. Kerry in his remarks denounced terrorism and said "The most recent wave of Palestinian violence has included hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past year, including stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks and bombings…" He noted that Palestinian leaders fail to condemn terrorist attacks and name public squares after terrorists. But he then added that "at the same time" (just as Obama said "on the other hand") the number of settlers is rising. So once again the administration presents building homes in the West Bank and terrorist acts as morally equivalent.

But the matter that most clearly shows that the parties are very far apart and that a peace deal is not at all close is Jerusalem. Kerry proposed that they share an undivided city that is the capital of both countries. How exactly does that work, in reality? He gave no clue. He closed his speech with a predictable reference to his and Obama's attendance at the funeral of Shimon Peres at the Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem, but he did not note the infamous incident to which it led. Obama's eulogy was released by the White House with the dateline "Jerusalem, Israel" but then corrected: a line was drawn through the word "Israel." It seems Kerry and the Obama administration were and are unwilling to state in which country Peres is buried.

Kerry stated that the U.N. resolution last week, which called Israeli construction of homes in East Jerusalem "a flagrant violation under international law," was nothing new and had always been the American position. And this in no manner prejudges negotiations about the final status of Jerusalem, he added. But that's precisely the point: The United States is saying that Israel has no right to the Western Wall and must negotiate for it.

Last week, the City of David archeological site in Jerusalem unveiled a restored 2,000-year-old road leading to the Western Wall. The road is about 150 feet long and was built near the Herodian Pool of Siloam, where worshippers cleansed themselves before walking up to the Temple. The pool is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah and the Gospel of St. John, and the road begins just south of the City of David and rises to the foot of the Western Wall's Robinson's Arch. But don't worry: the Israelis can try to negotiate for control of this location with the PLO, and the United States will not do anything to suggest that Israel should have sovereignty over it—or for that matter over the Western Wall itself.

Kerry concluded his speech by stating that "Ultimately, it is up to Israelis and Palestinians to make the difficult choices for peace." That is certainly true, but the chances that this will happen are diminished when an administration places no real pressure on the Palestinian side and endorses their recourse to the United Nations while they refuse face-to-face negotiations. Kerry's 70-minute apologia pro vita sua found no space to mention that twice, in 2000 and 2008, Israel made serious peace offers, but both times the Palestinians rejected them. He did not note that the Obama administration had tried and failed for eight years to get the Palestinians into serious negotiations—and that he himself had failed to move the Palestinian president into any serious effort at peace. He was left to explain and explain again why he had achieved nothing and why the administration had in the end, to use Daniel P. Moynihan's great phrase, "joined the jackals" at the United Nations. There was a certain pathos to the speech, especially as it was Kerry's last. He did not mean Israel any harm, and called it "a special country I immediately admired and soon grew to love." But harm he did—and if he cannot understand this, Israelis can.

Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party speaks in the court of Schiphol, the Netherlands. (EPA)

The Bourbons, said Talleyrand, learned nothing and forgot nothing. Sometimes it seems as if our modern liberals are just like the Bourbons. Here, for example, is a headline from the U.K.’s hard-line liberal newspaper, the Guardian: FAR-RIGHT PARTY STILL LEADING IN DUTCH POLLS, DESPITE LEADER’S CRIMINAL GUILT.

What was the crime of which the far-right leader—Geert Wilders—was guilty? It was incitement to discrimination; in other words, not even discrimination itself. He had discriminated against no one, but made a speech in which he called for “fewer Moroccans.” Significantly, the Guardian gave no further details of what Wilders meant by this—whether, for example, he proposed that fewer Moroccan immigrants should be allowed into the Netherlands, that the illegal Moroccan immigrants should be deported, or that Dutch citizens of Moroccan descent should be deprived of their citizenship and forcibly repatriated. For the Guardian, it hardly seemed to matter.

More significant still was the Guardian’s inability, even after the victory of Donald Trump in the United States—which must, in part, have been attributable to a revolt against political correctness—to see that the conviction of Wilders on a charge so patently designed to silence the fears of a considerable part of the population couldn’t possibly reduce his popularity. By illustrating the moral arrogance of the political class against which Wilders’s movement is a reaction, the charge might actually make him more popular.

The Guardian article, oddly enough, was accompanied by a photograph of some Muslim protesters in Amsterdam holding up banners in favor of sharia law. There weren’t many such protesters, it’s true, but they appeared to be doing Wilders’s work for him. “Sharia for the Netherlands,” said one banner. “Islam will dominate the world, freedom can go to hell,” said another.

Anyone who advocates sharia can plausibly be said to incite discrimination. Not even those who claim that the Islamic law was often superior in the past to available alternatives—for example, that Christian peasants in the Middle East preferred the jizya tax on dhimmis under Muslim rule to the exactions of the Byzantine Greeks—could maintain that equality under the law was one of sharia’s tenets. He who supports sharia supports legal discrimination on grounds that we have now come to regard as illegitimate.

Were, then, these protesters charged with incitement to discrimination? They held their banners under the very eyes of the authorities. Photos showed an ample police presence at their demonstration. I think it is a fair supposition, however, that no action was taken against them.

The law against incitement to discrimination is therefore implemented in a discriminatory way, something that those even marginally susceptible to Wilders’s rhetoric won’t fail to notice, though the readers of the Guardian probably will. One sometimes has the impression that liberals want to provoke the very reaction that they say they fear, so that they don’t have to think about such unpleasant and thorny questions as, “How many Moroccans do we want or need, and how do we go about attaining our wishes without resort to base methods and pandering to base passions?”

At the majority of America’s institutions of “higher learning,” reading Thomas Sowell was a subversive act in the early 1990s when I was a student. It remains so today. Why? Because the prolific libertarian economist’s vast body of work is a clarion rejection of all that the liberal intelligentsia hold dear.

Among the Left’s most corrosive ideas is the concept of perpetual and permanent racial victimhood, which social engineers pretend to rectify through federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized preferential policies. Sowell’s groundbreaking academic analyses of these programs in the U.S. and around the world exposed how elites profit mightily at the expense of the alleged beneficiaries of government-coerced affirmative action.

The grand rhetoric of diversity masks the true intent and actual impact of current racially discriminatory “solutions” to past racial discrimination: solidifying the power of the few over the many. As Sowell put it succinctly in one of the first pieces of his I came across in the journal The Public Interest: “Live people are being sacrificed because of what dead people did.”

In that essay, and much more deeply in his book Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, published that year, Sowell explored the “mismatch” effect in the ivory tower. While prestigious schools such as the University of California, Berkeley, congratulated themselves for manufacturing “wonderfully diverse” student bodies, ostensibly to make up for the legacy of American slavery (which Sowell pointed out was in no way unique to either the American South or blacks), he reported that more than 70 percent of black students at Berkeley failed to graduate.

“What they’ve effectively done” by lowering academic standards by race in the name of social justice, Sowell explained in an interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, “is rented these bodies for window dressing for a few years, and then, when they’re through with them, they’re put aside and a new bunch of bodies are brought in.”

Who benefits? Not the students, but the bean-counting administrators and political-correctness marketers at Berkeley — Diversity, Inc. — who exploit minority students for their glossy admissions brochures. The other vested interest? Tenured radicals in what Sowell called the “black-studies establishment” who “need students to be in their classrooms” to justify their paychecks.

Sowell, who grew up black and poor in Harlem, worked as a delivery man, served in the U.S. Marines, graduated from Harvard Law School, earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, and fully realized the folly of Marxism during a stint as a federal-government intern, spurned identity-politics collectivism.

“Fortunately, even during my period of Marxism I had respect for evidence and logic,” Sowell told an interviewer in 2004, “so it was only a matter of time before my Marxism began to unravel as I compared what actually happened in history to what was supposed to happen.”

Chromosomes and skin color and partisan loyalty didn’t dictate his thinking. He embraced time-tested, transcendent principles grounded in the reality of how things really are — as opposed to the fantastical imaginings of what he trenchantly called the “Vision of the Anointed.” Sowell’s book on that subject (published in 1995, the same year the Anointed One, Barack Obama, emerged on the national scene with his fabrication-filled memoir, Dreams of My Father) thoroughly dismantled the tyranny and tactics of self-described “progressives” whose control-freak narcissism is wrapped in good intentions and false narratives.

Sowell’s assessments were rooted not in fear or hatred or fanaticism or moral superiority, but in empirical evidence. He judged outcomes, not oration. He didn’t make excuses. He made sense.

“In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly ‘thinking people’ who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression,” Sowell observed. He continued:

In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes, but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many.

In another giant contribution to contemporary political and policy analysis, Sowell’s 1999 tome The Quest for Cosmic Justice addressed the abject failures of those who seek to cure all inequities, inequalities, disparities, and ills through government intervention. He summed up his findings thusly:

1. The impossible is not going to be achieved.

2. It is a waste of precious resources to try to achieve it.

3. The devastating costs and social dangers that go with these attempts to achieve the impossible should be taken into account.

The former leftist playwright David Mamet, in his 2008 manifesto “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal,” cited his exposure to Sowell, whom he dubbed “our greatest contemporary philosopher,” as a critical factor in his conversion. Whether tackling the “bait and switch media,” the “organized noisemakers,” or the lawless enablers of “social disintegration,” Thomas Sowell’s dozens of academic books and thousands of newspaper columns have sparked generations of his readers across the political spectrum to think independently and challenge imposed visions.

Asked once how he would like to be remembered, Sowell responded: “Oh, heavens, I’m not sure I want to be particularly remembered. I would like the ideas that I’ve put out there to be remembered.” Mission accomplished. Though it has been decades since he taught in a formal classroom, his students are legion.

US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a welcoming ceremony for the president at Ben Gurion Airport, March 20, 2013.(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from, and therefore allow, last week’s vote to censure Israel at the U.N. Security Council is a fitting capstone for what’s left of his foreign policy. Strategic half-measures, underhanded tactics and moralizing gestures have been the president’s style from the beginning. Israelis aren’t the only people to feel betrayed by the results.

Iraqis, who were assured of a diplomatic surge to consolidate the gains of the military surge, but who ceased to be of any interest to Mr. Obama the moment U.S. troops were withdrawn, and only concerned him again when ISIS neared the gates of Baghdad.

Ukrainians, who gave up their nuclear weapons in 1994 with formal U.S. assurances that their “existing borders” would be guaranteed, only to see Mr. Obama refuse to supply them with defensive weapons when Vladimir Putin invaded their territory 20 years later.

Pro-American Arab leaders, who expected better than to be given ultimatums from Washington to step down, and who didn’t anticipate the administration’s tilt toward the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate political opposition, and toward Tehran as a responsible negotiating partner.

Most betrayed: Americans.

Mr. Obama promised a responsible end to the war in Iraq. We are again fighting in Iraq. He promised victory in Afghanistan. The Taliban are winning. He promised a reset with Russia. We are enemies again. He promised the containment of Iran. We are witnessing its ascendancy in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. He promised a world free of nuclear weapons. We are stumbling into another age of nuclear proliferation. He promised al Qaeda on a path to defeat. Jihad has never been so rampant and deadly.

These are the results. They would be easier to forgive if they hadn’t so often been reached by disingenuous and dishonorable means.

The administration was deceptive about the motives for the 2012 Benghazi attack. It was deceptive about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s service record, and the considerations that led it to exchange five Taliban leaders for his freedom. It was deceptive about when it began nuclear negotiations with Iran. It was deceptive about the terms of the deal. It continues to be deceptive about the fundamental aim of the agreement, which has less to do with curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions than with aligning Washington’s interests with Tehran’s.

Now the administration is likely being deceptive about last week’s U.N. vote, claiming it did not promote, craft or orchestrate a resolution that treats the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City as a settlement in illegally occupied territory. Yet in November,John Kerry had a long talk on the subject with the foreign minister of New Zealand, one of the resolution’s sponsors.

“One of the closed-door discussions between United States Secretary of State John Kerry and the New Zealand government today was a potential resolution by the United Nations Security Council on a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict,” the New Zealand Herald reported last month. “‘It is a conversation we are engaged in deeply and we’ve spent some time talking to Secretary Kerry about where the U.S. might go on this,’” the paper added, quoting Foreign Minister Murray McCully.

The Israelis claim to have more evidence along these lines. If so, it means the administration no longer bothers to lie convincingly.

Even this might be excusable, if Mr. Obama at least had the courage of his mistaken convictions, or if his deception were in the service of a worthier end. Instead, we have the spectacle of the U.S. government hiding behind the skirts of the foreign minister of New Zealand—along with eminent co-sponsors, Venezuela, Malaysia and Senegal—in order to embarrass and endanger a democratic ally in a forum where that ally is already isolated and bullied. In the catalog of low points in American diplomacy, this one ranks high.

After the Carter administration pulled a similar stunt against Israel at the Security Council in December 1980, the Washington Post published an editorial that does the paper honor today.

“It cannot be denied,” the editors wrote, “that there is a pack and that it hounds Israel shamelessly and that this makes it very serious when the United States joins it.” The editorial was titled “Joining the Jackals.”

Unlike Mr. Carter, Mr. Obama hasn’t joined the jackals. He has merely opened the door wide to them, whether at the U.N. or in the skies over Syria or in the killing fields in Ukraine. The United States abstains: What a fitting finish to this ruinous presidency.